


The Lost Princess

by nepetrel



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Mutual Inspiration, Royalty, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-18 00:39:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13670646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nepetrel/pseuds/nepetrel
Summary: An adventurer meets a fairytale on the road. This is not an accident.





	The Lost Princess

**Author's Note:**

  * For [polkadot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/polkadot/gifts).



By her sixth hour wandering the fog-drenched woods, Aurelie had to admit she was well and truly lost. Luckily, this suited her just fine. 

She stopped and sat on a mossy rock to eat some of the food she'd brought along, washing it down with water from the extra skin she'd filched from the stables. She was aware, in the vaguest sense, of where the road was, or at least which general direction she'd need to walk to _find_ the road again. She had rations for another three days, and a cloak large enough to double as a blanket if she needed to sleep in the woods. She would be fine being lost for a little while longer. If she happened to have been very wrong in her planning and didn't find a town in the next few days – well, at least by then she'd be too far away for her brother to find her corpse and realize he'd been right. That thought cheered her up immensely. 

Still, Aurelie wasn't _that_ keen on dying alone in the woods. She finished off the last of her meal and made her way back out to where she thought the road might be, listening for footsteps or hooves the whole while.

She was proven right about the road, but she couldn't have been listening as well as she thought, because out of the swirling mists walked a strange dark horse with a strange dark rider on its back. It was a woman, sitting astride her horse with her black hair uncovered and bound only in a single braid. She wore a tunic over breeches and boots; Aurelie would have almost said she'd been dressed as a man, except for the swoop of her collar and the finely wrought gold necklace that lay on her breast, sitting out in the open as if bandits could not possibly concern her. 

Aurelie should have fled back into the woods. Instead, she only drew closer, and the strange rider smiled at her. “Hello,” she said. “Are you in need of a ride?” 

Her accent crackled around the edges like the first rumblings of thunder. It matched her foreign face and her foreign dress. 

Aurelie should have said no. Instead she asked, “which way are you headed?”

“To Alesia,” the stranger said, and held out her hand to help Aurelie mount. Aurelie heaved herself up to sit sidesaddle behind her, gripping the saddle's cantle for balance. 

The stranger did not ask her name, merely urging her horse forth to an amble. The horse was beautiful but odd, its ears smaller and its face longer than any she'd seen, and though its doubled burden had to be more than it could carry for long and the nearest settlement it could have come from was hours away, it walked without showing any fatigue. In fact, it was spirited; Aurelie underestimated its speed and had to reach forth with her other hand for balance, grabbing the stranger's leg. The breeches she was wearing were made of some fabric Aurelie had never felt before, somehow woven more tightly than anything she'd seen. 

Suddenly Aurelie realized she was touching a stranger quite intimately and shoved her hand back into her lap. The stranger only laughed. “I'm Marit,” she said. 

“Marit,” Aurelie repeated to herself. She couldn't guess where the woman had come from – the south, perhaps, or the strange islands to the west? But still, one name deserved another. “I'm...Aura,” she offered. The woman was clearly not from her kingdom, but that was no reason to be careless. 

They rode in silence for some time. Aurelie found herself nearly dozing, lulled by the motion of the horse. She'd been riding since she was four and had mastered the art of staying on a horse while asleep by age six; and though the road was unusually gloomy, covered in a low fog that wouldn't abate, she felt pleasantly warm sitting so close to Marit. She wasn't sure how much time had passed when Marit gently nudged her shoulder with her own. “It's getting dark,” Marit said. “Or, dark _er_ , anyway. Let's make camp.”

“All right,” Aurelie said, and it wasn't until she'd walked a bit into the woods and was helping to tie up the horse loosely enough that it could graze that it occurred to her that she could have just as easily said no and kept walking. But it had been a long day anyway, and she'd traveled further than she thought she would. There was no harm in stopping. 

Marit somehow had a tent that folded up impossibly small; when she unfolded it, it barely fit between the trees. Marit tied it down with pegs while Aurelie felt the outside of it. This was also a material she'd never felt, but different from Marit's breeches; Aurelie suspected Marit was from somewhere further away than she'd thought. Perhaps another continent, or the southernmost tip of their own; but why was she here, riding a horse alone without fear on the road at night and picking up wanderesses? 

She thought about asking Marit, but she was busy building a fire – or trying to, anyway. She had a flint and kindling, but somehow she couldn't make it light. Aurelie sighed. “You're holding that wrong,” she said, and knelt down to show Marit how it was done. 

Marit watched intently over Aurelie's shoulder, so close her breath whistled past Aurelie's ear. When the spark caught, Marit laughed, leaning back. “Thank you,” she said. “I would have been at that all night. At least I can provide dinner.”

Dinner was strange dried meats, spiced with something Aurelie wasn't used to. She drank so much after every bite that Marit offered up her own waterskin guiltily. Aurelie accepted it without shame. She needed as much water as she could get, after all. 

“What are your plans once you get to Alesia?” She asked, hoping for some clue as to Marit's origins. But Marit only shrugged.

“I'm only passing through,” she said. “I might ask if anyone has some work that needs to be done, but I don't know if I'll stay any longer than that.” Marit grinned. This close the fog was meaningless, and by the light of the fire Aurelie could see how pale and abnormally straight her teeth were. She gripped Marit's waterskin a little tighter. “What about you?”

“I'm passing through too,” Aurelie said. “I mean to find permanent work further south, perhaps in Avida.”

“And what will you do there?” Marit asked.

Aurelie wasn't sure herself. But she answered, “I can run a household, so a public house might find some use of me. And I know how to sew and embroider, especially fine letterwork. If there aren't too many tailors already, I could prove my skills there.” None of it appealed to her in the least, but it was better than the odious match her brother had decided was a good idea. She'd find a way to make happiness come from it.

“And you can write also,” Marit said plainly, as if those words hadn't frozen Aurelie through. “Couldn't you find work doing that?”

“You know who I am,” Aurelie said. She was gripping Marit's waterskin so tightly she thought she might crack it. She was tempted to run off with it entirely.

“I do.”

“You pretended not to!” 

“Aurelie,” Marit said, and Aurelie flinched, though there was no one around to hear her name. “I'm not exactly from around here. I didn't want to frighten you.”

Aurelie nodded tightly. She's figured this out, from the strange clothing Marit wore to the way she talked to her trouble with fire. “You're one of the fair folk,” she said. Marit was certainly beautiful enough for it. 

“What? No!” Marit laughed, like this was somehow amusing. Now Aurelie was tempted to throw the waterskin at her. Perhaps Marit realized, because she sobered quickly. “Aurelie, I know you from your writings,” she said. “I first read them in translation years ago. And I – I fell in love with them. I learned a dead language just to read them, and it's so much better this way. Your poetry flows like music, and it touches my heart like nothing else.” She raised a hand to her breast, perhaps unconsciously, as if she could take out her heart and prove it. “I wanted to meet the person who brought so much beauty into my life.”

“You read my writings...in translation, years ago,” Aurelie said, thinking hard. “That's impossible. Years ago I had barely started writing. And no one's read what I write except my brother, and he thinks it's ridiculous.” 

The fire was just embers now. Marit reached across it to touch Aurelie's hand. Carefully, she said, “when I'm from, you're known as the lost princess. Your brother looked for you for years. Eventually he got married and had children of his own, and one of them published your works to honor you. Not all of them survived to my time, but the ones that did were so...” She didn't seem able to finish the sentence, lapsing into silence and turning her head to the side as if she'd revealed too much.

Aurelie stared at her in astonishment. “To your time,” she repeated, her entire world realigning itself. She had been right; Marit was from somewhere stranger than she could imagine. 

“I wanted to know what happened to you,” Marit said, still not looking at her. “I wanted to know where you disappeared to, and I wanted to offer you – ” Here she cut herself off with an effort.

Aurelie had thought of touching people with her writing, in the distant way of a daydream so unlikely that she'd never bothered filling in the details. She couldn't have pictured Marit sitting across from her in the dying light, face shuttered but lovely, trying and failing to put words together to describe Aurelie's. 

Aurelie turned her hand over so it clasped Marit's, and that was enough to give Marit courage. “I wanted to offer you the chance to come with me,” she said. “I spent years trying to get permission, and I still don't really think I have it, but – everyone knows you disappeared, and even historians going back in time specifically to look for you weren't able to find you. So I thought, maybe if I went back – maybe I convinced you to disappear with me.”

“Yes,” Aurelie said. Marit gaped.

“What?”

“I said yes,” Aurelie repeated, and she found that she meant it. Since she was a child she'd always plunged foot-first into the unknown, excitement winning over fear every time, and the future was only a little more unknown than common life to her. She'd been prepared to die in the woods. The chance to live in a different world instead, with someone as lovely and strange as Marit, was more than she could have ever asked for.

“I – ” Marit leapt to her feet and embraced Aurelie, laughing against her. Aurelie found herself laughing too, giddy with the possibilities, so excited by all the things she didn't know that she was nearly shaking with it. 

“I can't wait to show you my dissertation on you,” she said into Aurelie's neck. “You're going to flip.”

Aurelie had no idea what that was, but she knew she was going to love finding out.


End file.
